*Note: The audio is my own recording in the radio studio. Apologies for the low volume on Tom’s end.

I appeared on local Cincinnati FM radio WVQC 95.7 to debate Anarcho-Marxist host, Tom Lynn of the show “Radical Analysis.” We discuss geo-politics, ethics and metaphysics, nature vs. nurture, propaganda, capitalism and the works of Marx, the Marxist tradition’s philosophical evolution, labor and organization of capital, individualism versus collectivism, and much more

Regarding the Anarchist social ideals, I think Tom had a pretty good point about how it is important from a psychological perspective to have “hope” that society can reach a certain ideal where we don’t need govt watching over our shoulders and molding things in such a way that we are oppressed (as I think he would put it) by their restrictions and oversight. Yeah, for some people, that would be an ideal world, yes. But Alfred Adler (a contemporary of Sigmund Freud who eventually parted ways with him on some points) would criticize that as being a “Fictional Finalism” or similar to that, a “fictional ideal” that guides how we operate today, with a view towards something in the future that realiastically will never come to be. For an individual, it is how we see ourselves if everything were exactly how we want it. It is harmful because it causes us to strive for something that can never happen, because it is an unrealistic ideal. Transfer that to a social sense, it could be an equally unrealistic ideal that is actually a sign of pathology the harder we strive for it. The “therapy” to address that is to see what the ideal says about a person/society, adapt it to what is actually healthy to strive towards, and adapt our actions to socially healthy ways to try to reach goals along the way to the new ideal. That’s very brief, but I think it is a good Adlerian way of looking at it.

But Jay also has this same “hope” that capitalism will not degenerate into collectivist corporatism, Machiavellian abuses of power, and individual enslavement to hierarchical authoritarianism. Nowhere does he say how capitalism is supposed to avoid the totalitarian tendencies and pitfalls of its dark history that he also criticizes. There is no point in history when capitalism was ever vindicated- even in the early days of liberal capitalism it was a lop-sided self-perpetuating crisis.

I know Jay would say that it is ultimately up to the “virtue” of individuals to not abuse that power they acquire in capitalism. But now that is getting to “purely a fantasy position, completely unrealistic, purely theoretical,” is it not?